West Girls by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

Author:Laura Elizabeth Woollett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC044000, FIC019000, FIC087000, FIC041000, FIC133000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Sher Chofez had a Wikipedia page. So did each of her adoptive parents. This was all I really needed to know about her. But I didn’t know to take it as a warning sign. The first time I met Sher, backstage at New York Fashion Week shortly after I turned twenty, she told me how uh-mazing I was, my talent was wasted in Europe, she could do for me what so-and-so did for Jessica Gomes. The next time, in her office, I’m not sure she remembered me. Even so, she said I’d made the right decision coming to NYC, nothing worthwhile happened anywhere else, nobody was as committed to mixed-race beauty as she was — and I sipped green tea, and contemplated the black freckles on her dun-coloured cheekbones, and heard the sirens on the street below, and signed. From that day on, she told me, exposure was more important than pay for a small fish like me, even girls with star power like Naya didn’t complain about working for free sometimes. Then came the talks about my confusing look: not ‘strong’ enough for the old guard, not ‘fresh’ enough for the vanguard, not ‘accessible’ enough for commercial. When I reminded her about my Samsung ad in Korea, she said — no joke — ‘Honey, this isn’t Seoul, this is New York.’

I didn’t know exactly how much Sher’s agency was charging me to share a one-bedroom shithole in Alphabet City with a laxative-addicted Slovenian, a sleep-talking Haitian, and a Venezuelan with a scary boyfriend who called her every few hours. I did know I couldn’t afford a nose job. Sher assured me Dr Diamond was an old friend, was doing her a favour by fitting me in, with the range it’d give me, it’d pay for itself — and I’d get a California holiday.

The town of Bullion, California, really put my talent for not getting murdered to the test. It’d been a prospecting town, once. There was a for-profit prison sixteen miles west. Every time I turned on the TV in my motel room, Forensic Files was on. That didn’t stop me from getting baked in front of the TV all day. There was literally nothing else to do, besides walking to the gas station for Diet Coke and jerky, and swimming in the motel pool — activities that inevitably brought me the wrong kind of attention. I was eternally constipated. Several times a night, I woke to the bone-jangling howls of coyotes, or freight trains, or gold-rush ghosts. I wrote poems. Frightening, frighteningly good poems, full of fluorescent leers and women with holes in their faces. In its own way, it was a golden time, too. But it made me furious. I never got over how furious Bullion made me.

‘Well … we’ll see how it settles,’ Sher said, the next time I sat in her office, but I saw the dismissal in her eyes: I didn’t look like Luna Luanymore, I looked like Luna Lewis.

Three weeks later, I saw

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